Multi-Currency Question

[iwells]

Please note the organization I'm working for has many existing branches that had Accpac prior to being absorbed by our organization, so some of the existing setups were already in place. Also keep in mind that many of these branches have their own system and company database and reside on different severs around the world (I've mentioned this before and in some cases due to bandwidth this is totally unavoidable and in other cases while it should have been consolidated when the branch was absorbed but wasn't likely due to lack of resources).

Many entities in South America are required to provide financial reporting to local government agencies in the currency of their country, in most cases I'm referring to Pesos (Chile, Columbia, Argentina, etc), however our central report currency is USD. The current setup is done such that the functional currency is set to USD so that consolidation is performed easily, however what this means is that when it's time to do local reporting there needs to be some adjustment of the source currency (a reverse revaluation). Essentially the USD is used throughout the month, reported on, consolidated elsewhere, then reversed to the local currency and local reporting is done. Currently this is done through a macro that's been created however I'm wondering if there's any other way to do this in Accpac?

In theory it would seem to make sense to have the functional currency be the local currency, then have a control account or allocation account prior to the GL which can take the amount and have that revalued, but that wasn't the case at the time. Also, I guess a whole new set of reports could be created but I haven't looked at that option yet as I want to see if there's something system based that could perform what's currently in place.

Version - Accpac 5.5-5.6

 

[ettienne]

The way it is setup makes no sense, it seems ass backwards.
The norm is that the company's functional currency is always set as the local currency (used in local reporting).
You could write financial reports in FR to do the reporting in local currency using a fixed exchange rate, or get fancy and use the currency rate tables to get an exchange rate for the local currency.

 

[iwells]

I totally agree ... but like I said it was configured that way prior to my organization acquiring the company and due to rapid growth there was no time to address the setup at the time.

Is it possible to adjust the currency en mass for a company including the functional currency or would it be better to load the data into a totally new company?

 

[ettienne]

No you cannot change the functional currency, there is way too much data surgery involved in such an operation. You are better off starting a new company with the currency set to the local currency and export/import the transactions. I've done this before for clients, it's tedious work. I wrote macros to automate the process.

 

[johnhugh]

Or, the other way around, you could keep your local USD companies and create additional local currency companies for reporting.
During the month you work in your USD company. At month end you run the GL consolidation into the local currency company for local reporting.